Why we started The Cycling Gym

One of the driving forces behind opening the gym was our desire to provide proper coaching and training advice to the local cycling community. We both feel that the discussion around training in the cycling community has been overwhelmed with the poor application of training concepts. We see riders training hard and never getting better. It doesn't have to be this way. Now we are taking our experience online to share it with you.

Between us we have 40 years of experience in the sport of cycling. Our ideas about training come from this experience - what we see work and what doesn't deliver results. We were introduced by a mutual friend in 2014 and soon after opened The Cycling Gym in Toronto.

Both of us raced, Steve on the mountain bike and Andrew out on the road. Steve transitioned into coaching and mentored some of the best mountain bike athletes in the country. The riders he coached consistently rode into the top 10 at the Canadian and US National level. He even developed some of his riders to be competitive on the international circuit. Andrew stayed with the racing and had a successful career as a professional, racing throughout the world. He won the Canadian National road race title and some UCI level races in Europe.

Everyone seems to think that to get better you have to train hard all the time. Missing in the discussion is that yes you have to train hard, but it has to be balanced and sustainable over time. And for some reason no one seems to believe in doing endurance rides anymore. These rides not only make you a better rider but are also some of the best part of the social aspect of cycling. Not every club ride needs to be a race.

This same motivation - to give people proper coaching advice and help them with continued improvement - is why we started The Cycling Gym Online. Here the idea is to load as much of our knowledge and ideas onto the website as possible. We want to share everything with you. Much of it will not follow the current paradigm in coaching that you might read online, but it has all been experienced and proven to work.